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Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-Based Learning
This book is a field guide on how to implement game-based learning and «gamification» techniques to the everyday teaching. It is a survey of best practices aggregated from interviews with experts in the field, James Paul Gee (Author, What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy ); Henry Jenkins (Provost Professor at University of Southern California); Katie Salen (Founder, Institute of Play); Bernie DeKoven (Author, A Playful Path ); Richard Bartle (Bartle’s Player Type Theory); Kurt Squire (Games + Learning + Society Center); Jessica Millstone (Joan Ganz Cooney Center), Dan White (Filament Games); Erin Hoffman (GlassLab Games); Jesse Schell (Schell Games/Professor at Carnegie Mellon); Tracy Fullerton (University of Southern California Game Innovation Lab); Alan Gershenfeld (E-Line Media); Noah Falstein (Chief Game Designer, Google); Valerie Shute (Professor at Florida State University); Lee Sheldon (Author, The Multiplayer Classroom ); Robert J. Torres (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), Asi Burak (President, Games for Change); Toby Rowland (MangaHigh); Jocelyn Leavitt (Hopscotch); Krishna Vedati (Tynker); and researchers at BrainPOP and designers from Electric Funstuff (Mission U.S. games). Each chapter concludes with practical lesson plan ideas, games to play (both digital and tabletop), and links to research further. Much of the book draws on the author’s experiences implementing games with his middle school students. Regardless of your teaching discipline or grade level, whether you are a pre-service teacher or veteran educator, this book will engage and reinvigorate the way you teach and how your students learn!
263 pages, Hardcover
First published December 23, 2014
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101 people want to read
About the author
Matthew Farber
8 books8 followersMatthew Farber, Ed.D. is Associate Professor of Educational Technology at the University of Northern Colorado. He is also Codirector of the Gaming SEL Lab.. He has been invited to the White House, authored several books and papers, and has collaborated with UNESCO and Games for Change.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 8, 2017
I read this book to help me gamify two units of study in my middle school social studies classroom. I had tried to gamify this past school year and wanted to see how I could improve. By reading Gamify Your Classroom I learned practical ways to improve the games I designed and new ways to use games to help students with a variety of learning styles gain academic and social skills. I especially found chapter 7, which detailed quest based learning helpful. The ideas presented will really be useful as I revise my games this summer.
December 4, 2017
An excellent overview of the current theories in gamification, the history of the movement, where it is going, and some excellent new learning platforms being developed by leading tech companies. Each chapter comes with suggested lesson plans and resources. While this book is focused on digital gaming, the author also suggests many simulated gaming experiences that can occur in group based projects that are not on computers.
September 9, 2015
To start off, I really enjoyed Gamify Your Classroom and it provided a wealth of ideas to implement in a classroom and lots to think about and contemplate regarding using games in the classroom. If I were to rate this book purely on my enjoyment of it, I would give it 4 stars. But that is extra subjective simply for the fact that when I read books on education and ideas for the classroom, I start off super thrilled about what I am reading and excited about the possibilities of using it in my own classroom, but then my interest starts to taper off near the end of the books. I think it is mainly a result of I gain such a wealth of things to think about in the first part of these books, that by the end I am just speeding through the last ideas because I can't fill up my brain with more things to contemplate right now! The same tapering of excitement happened to me in Gamify Your Classroom, but honestly I did not feel the quality of the book decreased any as the book neared the end. Matthew Farber continued to bring fresh ideas and quality research and interviews from beginning to end. This is the main reason for the 5 star rating...Farber put an excellent amount of work into this book. He interviewed a plethora of prominent individuals in the game-based learning field and did a great job of interweaving their responses throughout the book. The resources he provided at the end of each chapter was a great addition as well. Each chapter included a list of games discussed in the chapter and further related games and also ideas for lesson plans that integrate games in the classroom. A wonderful, practical resource for teachers!
My greatest appreciation for this book came from Farber's clear knowledge of the gaming culture. Often in game-based learning books, the author will be emphasizing the power of using games in the classroom, yet they are always using the same few specific games as examples and you can tell they are only looking at games through a purely educational lens. They are not grasping the whole view of what gaming in the classroom brings. They are teachers who use games only in the classroom. Farber, you can tell, is a teacher and also a gamer. He is someone who uses games outside of the classroom as well as inside the classroom. He does not limit his example games to a select few, but talks about many, many different games throughout the book. Therefore, he is able to bring out more insightful, imaginative, and creative uses for games in classroom, such as using Papers, Please! or Assassin's Creed 3. His book is packed with a variety of ways to use games in the classroom, from mainstream AAA games to edutainment games. Matthew Farber does an excellent job of exposing the reader to the pool of resources available to teachers interested in using games for learning.
He also remarks at times how he has used some of the games in his own classroom. Which is nice to know that his ideas are not all theoretical, but practical as well since they have been put to action already!
My greatest appreciation for this book came from Farber's clear knowledge of the gaming culture. Often in game-based learning books, the author will be emphasizing the power of using games in the classroom, yet they are always using the same few specific games as examples and you can tell they are only looking at games through a purely educational lens. They are not grasping the whole view of what gaming in the classroom brings. They are teachers who use games only in the classroom. Farber, you can tell, is a teacher and also a gamer. He is someone who uses games outside of the classroom as well as inside the classroom. He does not limit his example games to a select few, but talks about many, many different games throughout the book. Therefore, he is able to bring out more insightful, imaginative, and creative uses for games in classroom, such as using Papers, Please! or Assassin's Creed 3. His book is packed with a variety of ways to use games in the classroom, from mainstream AAA games to edutainment games. Matthew Farber does an excellent job of exposing the reader to the pool of resources available to teachers interested in using games for learning.
He also remarks at times how he has used some of the games in his own classroom. Which is nice to know that his ideas are not all theoretical, but practical as well since they have been put to action already!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews